The present invention relates to the packaging of ice-cream bars and other objects, wherein the objects are conveyed in rows from a production machine and deposited on a number of lanes of packaging material carried forward side-by-side.
Usually when carrying out the above-mentioned multilane technique, the number of lanes of packaging material conveyed in parallel is the same as the number of objects in each row. The simultaneous depositing of a whole row of objects on the parallel lanes has some advantages over the so-called single lane technique, where a row of objects is deposited simultaneously on an intermediate conveyor, from which the objects are transported one after the other to a single line of packaging material. The rate of wrapping is lower as a consequence of the parallel-conveyed lines, which increases the operational security of the apparatus and gives better conditions for heat sealing of the packaging material. When the objects can be deposited directly from the production machine, an intermediate conveyor may be eliminated so that the problems connected therewith are avoided, such as hygienic problems when wrapping food-stuffs.
The usual multi-lane technique also has some disadvantages. One of them is that the solution is not space efficient. Another disadvantage is that the amount of components necessary for the conventional multilane technique is high.